Study Partners and More

Just because you already speak a second language, doesn't mean the next one is going to be easy.

Speaking Czech & First Quiz

The past few weeks in class, I've spoken more Czech than I have in the previous eight years.

End of Second Week

At the end of my second week, I have four things of note.  First, I'm the only person whose name has been called for "reading" and/or giving examples in front of the entire group, every class.  At first I thought it was because my last name starts with the letter "B" so when she's going through her list of students, my name is one of the first on the list.   But, during that fourth class when it happened again and everyone noticed that I'd been called on during every class...yeah, I'm thinking it's not coincidence.  And it's not that I'm entirely comfortable either, maybe it's that my pronunciation isn't terrible?  No idea, but we'll see if it happens again next class.

First Homework Assignment

Our first homework assignment, just three simple exercises writing Russian the Russian alphabet in cursive - and not even all of it.  Well, that was the first exercise (writing about 10 letters, upper and lower case, three times each.  The second was combining two letters in cursive, twice each.  The third was writing about 13 words, once each.  Simple?  Well, mostly.  Of course, I waited until the day before it's due - and I work on the day of class, basically up until class, so I had no choice except to do the homework today.  My excuse was that I thought the homework really was simple, but I'm a perfectionist, so I erased my first letter half a dozen times until I was satisfied with it.  Then, instead of writing "za" in cursive twice, I started writing "za - az," "na - an" because that is how much of our pronunciation practice is laid out.  Two lines were wasted because of that.  Tomorrow's class needs to go better than homework - that's all I'm saying.
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